Baruch Bullae

A Hoard Nobody Excavated

In October 1975 four inscribed Hebrew bullae appeared in the shop of an antiquities dealer in East Jerusalem. They were bought by a collector, who took them to N. Avigad of the Hebrew University, then the leading Israeli authority on ancient seals. Over the following years more collectors arrived at Avigad's door with more bullae, bought from dealers in Jerusalem, in Bethlehem and in the village of Beit Sahour, and it became clear that they all came from a single hoard — pieces from different lots physically joined. The hoard eventually numbered more than 250 bullae. One collector, Yoav Sasson, ended up with nearly 200; another, Reuben Hecht, acquired 49 and gave them to the Israel Museum.

One of them read, in three lines of Old Hebrew, lbrkyhw / bn nryhw / hspr — "belonging to Berekhyahu, son of Neriyahu, the scribe." Avigad published it in 1978, and the identification proposed itself immediately: Baruch son of Neriah is Jeremiah's secretary, the man who wrote the prophet's scroll at his dictation in Jeremiah 36:4, and Berekhyahu is simply the fuller Yahwistic form of the name Baruch. A second bulla stamped from the same seal had surfaced in Jerusalem in the same decade, by a different route. It was bought by Rafi Brown, a former collector, dealer and restorer at the Israel Museum, sold on to the collector Shlomo Moussaieff in 1991, and published by R. Deutsch and M. Heltzer in 1994; Avigad never knew it existed. It carries a fingerprint, and in 1996 the suggestion was floated in print that the fingerprint might be Baruch's own.

Notice what is missing from all of that. No excavation. No findspot. No stratum. No layer of destruction debris around it, no pottery beside it, no record of who dug it or where. The corpus was found by villagers — accidentally or by illicit digging, and nobody knows which — then divided up and sold. There was one lead and it went nowhere. The dealers said the hoard had come from about forty-four miles south-east of Jerusalem, near Tell Beit Mirsim; several archaeologists including Avigad went and looked, found traces of recent illegal digging on a hill there but nothing deep enough to be the findspot, and Avigad himself admitted the search was brief and not very thorough. He thought the corpus looked like a royal archive from Jerusalem, but he rejected the City of David as its source, on the grounds that diggers there would have been noticed. Nothing was ever confirmed, and nothing can be now.

Why the Identification Was So Attractive

It is worth being clear about why this object became one of the most cited bullae in popular Christian writing, because the reasoning was not stupid. The match looks unusually tight on paper. The patronymic is exact: nryhw is Neriyahu, the full form of Neriah, the father named in Jeremiah 36:4. The title is exact: hspr, "the scribe," is what Scripture says Baruch did for a living. Name, father's name and occupation, all three. Set against the seals in this section that carry a bare personal name and nothing else, that looks decisive.

The given name needs one qualification, because it is where the argument actually sits. The bulla does not say Baruch. It says Berekhyahu, "Yahweh has blessed" — and Berekhyahu is the name the English Bible renders Berechiah, borne by several other men in Scripture. The identification depends on the standard philological view that Baruch is the shortened form of Berekhyahu, the divine element dropped, the way many Judahite names appear in both a long and a short version. That view is mainstream and it is probably right. It is also worth noticing what it means: before this bulla surfaced, nobody knew that Baruch's full name was Berekhyahu. An unexcavated object that supplies a previously unknown and biblically satisfying fact is exactly the kind of object that has to be checked hardest, whichever way the check comes out.

And the underlying picture is real enough. Judah at the end of the seventh century was a state that ran on sealed documents, and Jeremiah 32 describes the practice in unusual detail: a deed of purchase in two copies, one sealed and one open, witnessed, and handed to Baruch for safekeeping in an earthenware jar. Bullae are the physical residue of exactly that world. Whatever is true of these two pieces of clay, scribes like Baruch existed, sealed things, and left bullae behind.

What the Laboratory Found, and What an Unprovenanced Object Can Carry

In 2014 Y. Goren and E. Arie published a materials study of both bullae in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Their conclusion was blunt: the two bullae are modern creations, exhibiting a series of technological misconceptions, anachronisms and outright technological errors — that is, the clay and the manufacture do not behave the way genuine Iron Age bullae behave. C. Rollston, who had argued on epigraphic grounds since the early 2000s that a group of celebrated unprovenanced Northwest Semitic pieces were twentieth-century forgeries, treats the Baruch bullae in that company alongside the Ma'adanah seal.

The question is not closed by acclamation, and the case on the other side deserves to be stated rather than merely mentioned. In 2016 P. van der Veen, R. Deutsch and G. Barkay published a long rejoinder in the journal Antiguo Oriente. Their central argument is about the backs of the bullae. Re-examining Bulla 1 in particular, they conclude that the reverses were not impressed on papyrus at all but on wooden objects, plausibly on wooden writing boards — a use whose significance, they point out, has only become widely understood since 1992, long after the bullae surfaced. A forger working in the 1970s, on that reasoning, would have had no motive to fake a feature nobody had yet learned to look for. On the clay they are more cautious than their opponents: chemical analysis, they say, can establish which geological formation a clay came from, and cannot by itself prove or disprove authenticity either way. And they are careful about what their own case does. In their own words it does not prove the bullae authentic; what it claims is that the last word has not been spoken.

Both sides of this have history, and a reader weighing it should have both halves. Y. Goren gave expert evidence about Bulla 2 during the Israeli antiquities forgery trial. R. Deutsch, one of the rejoinder's three authors, is an antiquities dealer who published Bulla 2 himself and was a defendant in that same trial, of which he was acquitted. Neither fact settles anything about the clay. Both are the kind of thing an article about why provenance matters has no business leaving out.

So the accurate statement is that the authenticity of these two bullae is contested, with a published laboratory study against them and a published rebuttal in their defence, and that this app has found no survey establishing where the field as a whole has landed and does not claim one. What nobody can do is settle it by examining the findspot, because there is no findspot.

That is the point of this article, and it is the reason it is here rather than quietly dropped. An unprovenanced object cannot bear the weight that popular treatments put on the Baruch bullae. Even in the best case — even if a future study vindicates them completely — an object with no excavation context has to earn on its own everything a findspot would have given it for nothing. Unprovenanced objects can still matter enormously; the Amarna Letters and the first Dead Sea Scrolls reached scholarship the same way. But in a contested case like this one the findspot is precisely what would have settled the argument, and it was destroyed the day the hoard was dug up and divided. The antiquities market does not merely risk supplying fakes. It systematically destroys the information that would let anyone tell. A reader who has been told that archaeology has produced Baruch's own signature deserves three facts rather than one: that the object was bought in a shop, that the laboratory which examined it concluded it was made in the twentieth century, and that three epigraphers have published a detailed rebuttal arguing that conclusion is not established. All three, or none of them.

None of that touches Baruch himself. Jeremiah 36, 43 and 45 describe a man who wrote the prophet's words, read them in the temple court, was hunted for it, and was told plainly by God that he would not get the great things he was seeking. That account stands on the text of Jeremiah. It never stood on two lumps of clay from a dealer's shop, and it does not fall with them.

Scripture references

• Jeremiah 36:4 — Jeremiah calls Baruch son of Neriah, who writes the scroll at his dictation
• Jeremiah 36:10 — Baruch reads the scroll in the temple, in Gemariah's room
• Jeremiah 32:12 — The sealed and open deeds handed to Baruch — sealing practice described from the inside
• Jeremiah 45:5 — God's word to Baruch: do not seek great things for yourself

Sources

• ScholarshipY. Goren and E. Arie, "The Authenticity of the Bullae of Berekhyahu Son of Neriyahu the Scribe" — Yuval Goren and Eran Arie, Tel Aviv University and the Israel Museum · Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 372 (2014), 147-158. Hosted only on repositories that refuse automated requests, so no link is givenSupports: The conclusion that both bullae are modern creations showing technological anachronisms
• ScholarshipP. van der Veen, R. Deutsch and G. Barkay, "Reconsidering the Authenticity of the Berekhyahu Bullae: A Rejoinder" — Pieter van der Veen, Robert Deutsch and Gabriel Barkay · Antiguo Oriente 14 (2016), 99-136. Open access through the Universidad Catolica Argentina repositorySupports: The argument from the imprints on the reverses, the caution about what clay analysis can show, the history of Bulla 2, and the authors' own statement that their case does not prove the bullae authentic
• ScholarshipC. Rollston, "The Forger Among Us: The Museum of the Bible Dead Sea Scrolls and the Recent History of Epigraphic Forgeries" — Christopher Rollston, George Washington University · Rollston Epigraphy, 15 March 2020. Served over plain http. Note that this post names the Baruch bullae in a list rather than arguing the case; the argument itself is the Eretz-Israel paper belowSupports: The placing of the Baruch bullae in a wider list of twentieth-century Northwest Semitic market forgeries
• Holding institutionThe Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and the S. Moussaieff collection — The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Bulla 1, Hecht collection); S. Moussaieff (Bulla 2, privately held) · No object page is cited because there is none to cite: the Israel Museum's collection site returns a bot-challenge page rather than a record to any automated request, and a private collection publishes nothing at all. The custody itself is documented in the 2016 rejoinder's figure credits. That an article about provenance cannot produce an institutional object record is part of the article's own pointSupports: Where each of the two bullae is held
• ScholarshipC. Rollston, "The Bullae of Baruch Ben Neriah the Scribe and the Seal of Ma'adanah Daughter of the King: Epigraphic Forgeries of the 20th Century" — Christopher Rollston, George Washington University · Eretz-Israel 32 (the Joseph Naveh volume), pages 79*-90*. The paper the blog post above points to. Hosted only on repositories that refuse automated requests, so no link is givenSupports: The epigraphic case that the Baruch bullae and the Ma'adanah seal are twentieth-century forgeries
• ReferenceH. Shanks, "Jeremiah's Scribe and Confidant Speaks from a Hoard of Clay Bullae" — Hershel Shanks, Biblical Archaeology Review 13:05 (September/October 1987), reproduced by the Center for Online Judaic Studies · The contemporary account of how the hoard surfaced: October 1975, an East Jerusalem dealer, more than 250 bullae divided among collectorsSupports: The market history, the collectors, the Tell Beit Mirsim claim and the failed search for a findspot, and Avigad's rejection of the City of David
• ScholarshipN. Avigad, "Baruch the Scribe and Jerahmeel the King's Son" — Nahman Avigad, Hebrew University of Jerusalem — the first publication · Israel Exploration Journal 28 (1978), 52-56; restated in The Biblical Archaeologist 42/2 (1979), 114-118. Print onlySupports: The reading of the inscription and the original identification with Jeremiah's scribe

Further reading

• Center for Online Judaic Studies: Jeremiah's scribe and the hoard of clay bullae

Reflect

Baruch was told not to seek great things for himself, and the object that made him famous may be a fake. What would be left of your faith if the evidence you lean on hardest turned out to be worth less than you thought?